Here’s Some Practical Ways Any Business Can Succeed with Social Media Participation

Today I’d like to discuss how a company should approach social media participation. In 2021, you have to have some sort of social media presence- social media creates engagement and awareness for your company, as well as give you the opportunity to make updates and appeals in real time. You can also build a highly targeted audience who willingly follows you and shares your content, gaining lots of earned media. And with over 3 billion users using some sort of social media, you have access to half the world’s population in an effective, inexpensive and fast way (Newberry, 2018). 

However, what’s the right social media mix for your business? What platform(s) do you belong on? How much participation should you have? How much content can you churn? What about tone and voice? How much should you spend? 

“We need to be on social media”

For the companies I’ve worked with, my stakeholders usually say the same thing- “we need to be on social media.” They don’t necessarily know what that means, but the consensus usually is the minimum is doing “something” on Facebook and Twitter. I’ve also had wildly different support- one company let me hire an assistant and gave me a substantial advertising budget, while another had no budget and made social media a side part of my job. However, the same theme seems to come up no matter where I’ve worked- get us lots of people and get them to do something. But that’s not a recipe for success with social. 

So what is the right social media mix for your company? My personal view is at a minimum you should have a Facebook business page. This is because Facebook has the largest audience of all social media platforms- as of January 2021, Facebook had 2.8 million users and is the social platform where users spend the most time, with the average user using Facebook 58 minutes per day (Oberlo, 2021). You can’t refute the value in those numbers. Facebook also gives businesses a robust list of tools with business pages, including Insight tools to track your audience- you could almost get away with a Facebook page being your only online presence with the About page, content curation (photos and videos), reviews, and much more. There’s also the powerful Facebook Messenger, where you can automate messages to customers to ensure they get a response right away, and if you’re savvy enough, you can use Facebook Developer tools to add even more things to your page like newsletter signups and other page content. And this is just the free stuff Facebook gives you- you can use Facebook advertising in lots of highly targeted ways to achieve all kinds of business goals, whether that’s increasing engagement or followers, increasing traffic to your website, downloading you app, purchasing something, and more. Depending on your target audience, you could get away with doing nothing else except Facebook and have a very effective social media strategy. 

Anything beyond Facebook should be determined by your target audience. Twitter is a great tool for engagement and getting information out quickly (for instance, where your food truck will be today or changing store hours). However, there’s a lot of noise on Twitter, so cutting through on that platform means making multiple Tweets a day (Thompson, 2021). If you’re catering to a young, hip audience, you should be on Instagram, TikTok, or WhatsApp where you can share highly engaging content like photos and videos- however, these platforms value authenticity, and each of these trendy platforms require their own form of highly engaging content. A creator or crafty business would benefit from a Pinterest account, but Pinterest can be time consuming and it takes time to build an audience . Niche and nerdy crowds live on Reddit, where you can find any kind of audience within their endless subreddits that provided highly targeted audiences by topic. If you’re going for B2B, networking, or looking for employees, you should look into LinkedIn. 

You can’t be everything to everyone

Knowing your business persona and customer demographics is essential for finding the right audiences for your business. However, you must be choosy on which platforms you appear on. I’ve seen too many businesses try to be everywhere at once, and unless you have a really strong social media team, that can be a recipe for disaster. First, you can’t have a one post fits all strategy- what works on Twitter won’t work on TikTok, so you’ll need to create different content with different voices for each platform. That’s a lot of content to create if you’re in too many places at once. The second pitfall I see is a business joins a bunch of different platforms and ends up not posting enough or an account becomes orphaned- nothing kills momentum faster than inactivity since you’ll lose that top of mind engagement that comes with showing up in users’ newsfeeds, and your inconsistency and inactivity will be punished by the algorithms that decide if your post is worth showing to users. Plus, inactivity is annoying- when I come across a page that hasn’t posted in months, it makes me think the business either doesn’t care about sharing information with me, the information there is out of date and therefore not useful, or is out of business. Finally, being everywhere takes time- you can’t just post stuff and hope it works. Each platform has different trigger points and pain points, and users have a system and culture that are unique to each platform. You’ll need to have a planned out strategy for each platform and make frequent posts on all of them just to keep up. Plus, your content needs to be top-notch all the time- if you want to get noticed and build engagement you’ll need to make engaging videos, eye-popping photos, and witty comments all the time and at the right time to cut through all the noise. That’s really hard to do on one social media platform, let alone 4 or 5. 

For me, I try to stick to three social media platforms, usually Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I also create a LinkedIn account for my business, just so I show up there and have a presence. Between these platforms, I am hitting the biggest general audience I can in a sustainable way. I use Facebook for awareness, gathering followers, and getting the word about my business and what I do. Twitter is for daily engagement. Instagram gets me in with a younger audience, and using an Instagram business account gets me noticed by a highly engaged audience- plus, the business tools on Instagram interact with the Facebook business tools, so I get some cohesion with account management and advertising. 

What’s your frequency, Kenneth?

Next, how much participation should your business have on social media? As stated earlier, you need to make frequent posts to get noticed and stay in your users’ newsfeeds, but what does frequent mean? Five times a day? Once a week? In doing research on this, there doesn’t seem to be any real consensus on frequency- some say once a week, others say once a day. It also depends on the kind of business you have- a blogger might only post when a new blog post is published, but a restaurant might post daily specials every day. You’ll need to decide how much you post based on how much content or information you can share, how much engagement you’re getting out of it and your ROI. 

One major consideration for when deciding frequency is valuing quality over quantity (Henderson, 2020). One really well-made and engaging video will get more notice than a dozen just okay videos- plus you can promote that one great video to maximize your engagement. This can work with photos and posts as well. Doing a few things really well will get you more mileage than lots of things that are just ok.

When I start a new social account, I try posting one post every other day until I get a feel for how much engagement I’m getting, and I look at what other businesses similar to mine are doing that look effective, then adjust my posting schedule. Again, it’s really all about what value you’re offering and how much you can produce that’s effective for your audience.

Would you have a drink at a bar with your business?

Your social media presence should also have a tone and voice that matches your business. This brand voice is the personality your brand takes on in communications (Chen, 2020). I try to treat my social media accounts like they’re people- are they bold and exciting? Informative? Calm and consistent? Do they use slang words or proper English? How you phrase your posts and the photo and videos you choose add to this brand voice and help you stand out on social- in fact, Sprout Social says 33% of the consumers they surveyed said “distinct personality” was what made a brand stand out more than others. Once you decide your personality, stick to it- slip into that personality with every social post, every photo, and even in other communications like your newsletter. This consistency is what builds your audience by keeping you top of mind (Newberry, 2018), and when consistency, quality and authenticity meet, you have a better chance of establishing your voice, getting noticed and cutting through social media algorithms that decide if and when you should show up in customers’ social feeds. 

Spending for followers

Finally, a big question I’m asked a lot is how much should you spend on social media. First off, I’m a big proponent of free- I’m used to getting brands established on a shoestring budget, so I take advantage of things like pushing my social channels on my websites and newsletters. I also follow a lot of blogs and newsletters about the latest tactics to increase engagement on social media. Engagement is when users on social do something with your content, whether it’s a like, share, a click, mentions, retweet, or any other action, and the more engagement you have the more social media channels will value your content (Eckstein, 2021). Facebook’s latest algorithm favors engagement over organic reach (content naturally coming to you on its own). According to Facebook:

“Interacting with people is associated with a greater sense of well-being… On the other hand, just scrolling through your Facebook feed, passively reading or watching without interacting with others, tends to make people feel worse.”

This is true for other social media platforms as well, so generating engagement with quality content and engaging your audience by responding to them will help you get more notice, increasing your followers and engagement. 

However, if you don’t spend some money, it will take a lot longer to build audience on social media, and if no one is seeing your great content, then no one is clicking through to your website, reading your awesome article, buying your stuff or hiring your service. This is where social media advertising can speed up the process. Some people jump straight to paying for followers, but I’ve learned that doesn’t always equate to more engagement. This is because while you might increase your followers, many of them will be superficial, or worse, fake accounts. So while you feel great that you now have 10,000 followers, many of them simply clicked “like” and will never do much of anything again with your page. On Facebook, this will actually hurt your brand since their algorithm looks at the percentage of engagement to followers and will lower your chances of showing up in users’ newsfeeds (Johnson, 2021). Therefore, it’s better to build your audience naturally, since those people that follow you are more invested and will more likely engage with your brand more often- again, quality over quantity. So where should you spend money on social? One effective strategy I use is boosting posts. For instance, by boosting highly engaging posts, you’re creating a snowball effect where those likes and shares increase with the boost (I do this sparingly as not every post deserves a boost). I also like to boost posts that are promoting a new feature or update to my services- for instance, when I launched a new website for my newspaper, we announced the big changes on Facebook and boosted that post, which pushed that post higher into our customers’ newsfeeds. 

Each social media platform has its own unique advertising that will help build engagement and awareness, and while they can seem daunting, many of them can be very effective to grow your business. Social Pilot (n.d.) has a great list of things to think about when doing any social media advertising: 

• Set clear objectives and expectations- what do you want to accomplish with this ad or boost?
• Restrict the time period- don’t run an ad or boost a post for more than a week tops
• Narrow your audience- social media platforms have targeting tools to create custom audiences that can be narrowed down to just your followers, friends of followers, geographic locations, age, topics and interests, and more
• Boost posts that are preforming well- again, users will be more likely to engage with a post that has lots of likes and shares 

How much you should spend is a very subjective idea. What can you afford? How much movement do you want? In my experience, I like to throw small amounts of money to start and then see what my ROI is. Many social media platforms have great advertising insights and will show you how much money you’re spending for the action you wanted. For instance, I’ve had campaigns where I spent $5 to boost an article I shared, and my cost was around $.25 per click on that post. Was it worth paying $.25 per click? If it was, then I up my budget next time. Recently, I paid for a Facebook ad to promote ordering food from my church’s food festival. I figured out that my ad, at $5 for 5 days, made me 50 orders at $.10 per order. With an average order around $55, paying $5 meant I made almost $3000. Next time, I’ll up my ad to $50 and see if that holds true (and even if it cost me $1 per order, that’s still a great ROI). Play around with small amounts to see what works for you, and then increase your budget to see if your engagement grows exponentially. 

Conclusion

When allocating your marketing resources, social media has to be a part of that equation. How much of that equation depends on your business needs, what you can afford, and how much content you can churn. Remember that there is no silver bullet for social media strategy since all kinds of factors come into play (size of business, type of business, business goals, etc.), but remember that quality beats quantity every time. Be attentive, be engaging, interact with your followers and experiment in small doses, and you’ll eventually find the right mix for your business. 

References 

Chen, J. (2020, August 4). Brand voice: What it is & why it matters. Sprout Social. Retrieved from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/brand-voice/

Eckstein, M. (2021). Social media engagement: Why it matters and how to do it well. Buffer. Retrieved from https://buffer.com/library/social-media-engagement/

Henderson, G. (2020, May 27). How often should I post on social media for my business. DigitalMarketing.org. Retrieved from https://www.digitalmarketing.org/blog/how-often-should-i-post-on-social-media-for-my-business

Johnson, T. (2021, January 11). Here’s what will happen if you buy Facebook likes [2021 Update]. Tinuiti. Retrieved from https://tinuiti.com/blog/paid-social/buy-facebook-likes/

Newberry, C. (2018 May 2). 23 benefits of social media for businesses. Hootsuite. Retrieved from https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-for-business/.  

Oberlo. (2021). Most popular social media platforms in 2021. Retrieved from https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/most-popular-social-media-platforms. 

SocialPilot Team. (n.d.). Is it worth boosting Facebook posts – When and how to do it. SocialPilot. Retrieved from https://www.socialpilot.co/blog/worth-boosting-facebook-posts-when-and-how-to

Thompson, N. (2021, March 15). 8 best social media platforms for business: your ultimate guide. OptinMonster. Retrieved from https://optinmonster.com/best-social-media-platforms-for-business